Consumer photo editing is on the rise due at least in part to wide availability of the mobile phones, tablets, and other portable devices that include cameras and are powerful enough to support image editing software. A variety of different editing operations may be applied to process an image. One example is a spot healing operation in which unwanted features such as facial blemishes and lens artifacts may be selectively removed from an image. Traditional tools designed to perform spot healing are complex and may not be well suited for mobile platforms and unsophisticated consumers. Moreover, existing spot healing tools designed to globally remove defects often are over selective and therefore may wrongly detect and remove desired features as noise. Due to the complexity of image editing software, users may simply choose not to use the software or may be frustrated when they perform editing operations and fail to achieve acceptable results.